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Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships
All human cultures across time have created rituals, bringing family members together to celebrate, welcome, honor, or mourn. While contemporary rituals still exist to serve these important functions, we often perform them automatically, without considering their vital roles in our lives. Many individuals feel alienated from the rituals of their childhoods, while others are struggling to create satisfying new traditions that reflect their own present needs and circumstances. Authors Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts show how we can learn to tap the power of rituals to mark transitions, express important values, heal the past, and deepen relationships. Each chapter looks at the special issues and possibilities for nuclear, extended, single-parent, and remarried families, as well as for single adults and couples. The authors also pay particular attention to how changing gender roles are reflected in our rituals, and how revitalized traditions can actually alter the course of intimate relationships. Filled with first-person stories and practical examples, this book will help all readers enhance the meaning of traditions old and new, reinforcing and celebrating life's many milestones and ties.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
4 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Evan Imber-Black
14 books2 followersCurrent Director of Program Development at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City and Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Previously
*Director of Training at the Family Therapy Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of
*Past-president of the American Family Therapy Academy
*Recipient of the 1990 American Family Therapy Academy Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice
*Recipient of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Cumulative Contribution to Marriage and Family Therapy
The mother of two grown children, and grandmother of three, she lives with her husband in Westchester,NY where she practices family therapy.
Previously
*Director of Training at the Family Therapy Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of
*Past-president of the American Family Therapy Academy
*Recipient of the 1990 American Family Therapy Academy Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice
*Recipient of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Cumulative Contribution to Marriage and Family Therapy
The mother of two grown children, and grandmother of three, she lives with her husband in Westchester,NY where she practices family therapy.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 2, 2016
Black Friday is being extended to an entire week this year. The day after New Year's, our local store puts up the Valentine's Day stuff. Some of us would rather have a root canal than go to a wedding, but feel compelled to go to family funerals...or vice versa...or would have to be dragged to either, kicking and screaming. I wonder, how much stress in our lives comes from trying to negotiate expectations around holidays, traditions and ceremonies? Is it a wonder that many of us either decide to not observe such things at all or ignore then personal/religious/emotional parts and go straight for the consumerism?
Perhaps the most useful thing in this book is that it goes beyond the usual pop-psychology cheerleading about the importance of ritual and traditions and focuses on examining the reasons one follows -- or avoids following -- rituals, traditions and holidays. The authors point out that many of us get stuck in observing (or not) special occasions a specific way and don't even realize that the traditions no longer serve our lives or makes us happy. Or, conversely, many of us have become adverse to ritual and traditions because there is so much baggage attached to them, not realizing there are ways of reinventing the occasions or ways of marking them. It's all pretty much common sense stuff, but sometimes it takes having someone else point out the obvious to make us think about it.
Although over 20 years old, the main ideas are not as dated as one might expect. I did find later chapters redundant, but not so much that I was tempted to skip any.
It's worth a read, especially at this time of year.
Perhaps the most useful thing in this book is that it goes beyond the usual pop-psychology cheerleading about the importance of ritual and traditions and focuses on examining the reasons one follows -- or avoids following -- rituals, traditions and holidays. The authors point out that many of us get stuck in observing (or not) special occasions a specific way and don't even realize that the traditions no longer serve our lives or makes us happy. Or, conversely, many of us have become adverse to ritual and traditions because there is so much baggage attached to them, not realizing there are ways of reinventing the occasions or ways of marking them. It's all pretty much common sense stuff, but sometimes it takes having someone else point out the obvious to make us think about it.
Although over 20 years old, the main ideas are not as dated as one might expect. I did find later chapters redundant, but not so much that I was tempted to skip any.
It's worth a read, especially at this time of year.
August 19, 2012
There were some good things about this book about the meaning, value, purpose, and role of ritual in family life. I lost interest about halfway through and ended up skimming the second half. While it does contain some planning lists/worksheets for considering your own family rituals, the overall emphasis is on short vignettes of how other families have coped with challenges or occasions in their own lives. Also, the focus is on very conventional, mainstream "ritual" occasions--birthdays, anniversaries, holidays--rather than on life cycle rites of passage and other more spiritual transitions in one's life.
April 8, 2013
A guidebook for the not so readily understood family dynamics and rituals in everyone's lives. Laden with anecdotes, the authors offer a wide rage of ritual styles in the examples and explanations of difficulties when rituals shift. Easy to read with practical information. There were no glaring misconceptions debunked but I am not a sociologist or therapist and most of the content seemed like the common sense that you don't often discuss.
October 3, 2010
This is a great book about how traditions, celebrations, and other rituals are used in our lives. The text is somewhat redundant, but this ends up serving the reader by making sure that I have thoroughly grasped the concepts presented.
October 10, 2012
Enjoyed this book and its real-life examples of ritual healing power. Takes a therapeutic approach to building, changing, and celebrating rituals in family life.
September 23, 2014
Though some of the examples were a bit out of date (it was last updated in 1992) the concept of course is timeless. Interesting insights and useful suggestions.
December 3, 2022
RITUALS FOR OURTIMES Celebrating, Healing, and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships is a 333 page book whose central theme is to analyze the meaning of rituals in our times and how they influence how we perceive reality and act as individuals and group entities.
Imber-Black and Roberts are two therapists that work with individuals, couples and families since 1970. They have shown a big interest in family rituals because by analyzing them they found it to be possible to learn more about human history and current relationships. These authors show us that rituals have been a powerful way to harness the sources of individual and joint creativity, heal personal pain and celebrate life.
It is also important to mention that their participation in the book Rituals in Family Therapy and Family Therapy (1988) was very successful and their first exploration about this topic.
They found that when people were given a framework to examine past and present rituals they often became markers of rich and significant rituals in their current lives.
They also consider that rituals provided a key to unlock confusing and painful family relationships and friendships.
Simply observing a ritual could speak volumes to any of us about our own beliefs and our repeated interactions with those who matter to us.
Imber-Black and Roberts are attempting to show how rituals can simultaneously connect us with our common humanity and with each of our own unique paths in life.
The book shows the richness of diversity illustrated with a variety of ethnic and religious heritages.
Each chapter pays special attention to the problems that arise within nuclear families, extended, single parent, remarried families, as well as single adults and couples.
The authors also pay particular attention to how changing roles are reflected in our rituals, and how to revitalize traditions.
They present rituals as an opportunity to get both a familiar meaning and a mysterious one at the same time, because familiarity provides anchor points to help us make transitions into the unknown such as turning a year older, celebrating an anniversary, or becoming a married person.
Rituals contain the use of symbols that embrace meaning that cannot always be easily expressed in words. Also symbols and symbolic actions are powerful activators of sensory memory.
According to these authors rituals can be classified in four categories:
Daily, traditions, celebrations and, life-circle.
Function for five purposes:
• Relating: Shaping, expressing and maintaining relationships.
• Changing: Lifestyles, values, beliefs.
• Healing: recovering from relationship betrayal, trauma, or loss
• Believing: voicing beliefs and making meaning
• Celebrating: Affirming
Six ritual styles:
Minimized, interrupted, rigid, obligatory, imbalanced, and flexible.
Every family develops its own individual style of ritual with the influence of the experiences in the particular family history.
When I started reading this book at some moment I found it a bit repetitive in terms of the role of rituals and traditions as a connector between past and current generations. I can see the idea of displaying transgenerational models as part of the perspective of this book.
However, the great variety of stories that appear in this book showed that rituals, despite being important with the family structure, can be strong stressors for members of non-traditional families.
When the authors made an invitation to create traditions tailored to their individual family beliefs and needs, I realized the presence of a structural approach in which the ritual can be manipulated as a way of delineating new family hierarchies, thus giving opportunity to changes is gender roles and opening of acceptance to families with new structures such a single parents, or LGBT couples.
Thinking about rituals and the way that could be interpreted and attribute meaning in our existence according to the three compelling epistemological frameworks I see the rituals as:
• Premodernism: Rituals are an ultimate truth in our share existence and this truth is not visual or behaviorally observed in the physical world, it is a deeply felt, intuitive experience. For that reason could be extremely difficult make any change in the system with very rigid rules and a stressful atmosphere in the family.
• Modernism: Rituals can be questioned according to scientific knowledge of academics who could make, measure, and observe changes.
• Postmodernism: Rituals can truly account for the life experience of each individual, because there is not absolute truth and the reality may be continually deconstructed and reconstructed by each individual.
Rituals play a very important part in the human life. However, the construction and interpretation may vary depending on the culture and the context.
However, I agree that the analysis of the rituals of our times is an important exercise to learn about our past, understand our present, and plan a future with greater self-awareness.
This sentence that appears in the book read to me as words with meaning that resonates through time itself:
“The ritual in our lives contribute to our changing sense of ourselves over time, while also connecting us to the generations who came before us.”
It is our rituals that simultaneously connect us with what is universal human experience, while also allowing our unique personhood, family, ethnic group, and culture to emerge.
Imber-Black and Roberts are two therapists that work with individuals, couples and families since 1970. They have shown a big interest in family rituals because by analyzing them they found it to be possible to learn more about human history and current relationships. These authors show us that rituals have been a powerful way to harness the sources of individual and joint creativity, heal personal pain and celebrate life.
It is also important to mention that their participation in the book Rituals in Family Therapy and Family Therapy (1988) was very successful and their first exploration about this topic.
They found that when people were given a framework to examine past and present rituals they often became markers of rich and significant rituals in their current lives.
They also consider that rituals provided a key to unlock confusing and painful family relationships and friendships.
Simply observing a ritual could speak volumes to any of us about our own beliefs and our repeated interactions with those who matter to us.
Imber-Black and Roberts are attempting to show how rituals can simultaneously connect us with our common humanity and with each of our own unique paths in life.
The book shows the richness of diversity illustrated with a variety of ethnic and religious heritages.
Each chapter pays special attention to the problems that arise within nuclear families, extended, single parent, remarried families, as well as single adults and couples.
The authors also pay particular attention to how changing roles are reflected in our rituals, and how to revitalize traditions.
They present rituals as an opportunity to get both a familiar meaning and a mysterious one at the same time, because familiarity provides anchor points to help us make transitions into the unknown such as turning a year older, celebrating an anniversary, or becoming a married person.
Rituals contain the use of symbols that embrace meaning that cannot always be easily expressed in words. Also symbols and symbolic actions are powerful activators of sensory memory.
According to these authors rituals can be classified in four categories:
Daily, traditions, celebrations and, life-circle.
Function for five purposes:
• Relating: Shaping, expressing and maintaining relationships.
• Changing: Lifestyles, values, beliefs.
• Healing: recovering from relationship betrayal, trauma, or loss
• Believing: voicing beliefs and making meaning
• Celebrating: Affirming
Six ritual styles:
Minimized, interrupted, rigid, obligatory, imbalanced, and flexible.
Every family develops its own individual style of ritual with the influence of the experiences in the particular family history.
When I started reading this book at some moment I found it a bit repetitive in terms of the role of rituals and traditions as a connector between past and current generations. I can see the idea of displaying transgenerational models as part of the perspective of this book.
However, the great variety of stories that appear in this book showed that rituals, despite being important with the family structure, can be strong stressors for members of non-traditional families.
When the authors made an invitation to create traditions tailored to their individual family beliefs and needs, I realized the presence of a structural approach in which the ritual can be manipulated as a way of delineating new family hierarchies, thus giving opportunity to changes is gender roles and opening of acceptance to families with new structures such a single parents, or LGBT couples.
Thinking about rituals and the way that could be interpreted and attribute meaning in our existence according to the three compelling epistemological frameworks I see the rituals as:
• Premodernism: Rituals are an ultimate truth in our share existence and this truth is not visual or behaviorally observed in the physical world, it is a deeply felt, intuitive experience. For that reason could be extremely difficult make any change in the system with very rigid rules and a stressful atmosphere in the family.
• Modernism: Rituals can be questioned according to scientific knowledge of academics who could make, measure, and observe changes.
• Postmodernism: Rituals can truly account for the life experience of each individual, because there is not absolute truth and the reality may be continually deconstructed and reconstructed by each individual.
Rituals play a very important part in the human life. However, the construction and interpretation may vary depending on the culture and the context.
However, I agree that the analysis of the rituals of our times is an important exercise to learn about our past, understand our present, and plan a future with greater self-awareness.
This sentence that appears in the book read to me as words with meaning that resonates through time itself:
“The ritual in our lives contribute to our changing sense of ourselves over time, while also connecting us to the generations who came before us.”
It is our rituals that simultaneously connect us with what is universal human experience, while also allowing our unique personhood, family, ethnic group, and culture to emerge.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews